Young Life: Brandon Taylor’s Novel, The Late Americans
Mixed Thoughts
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I am reading Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans (2024) right now. I have mixed feelings. He’s a gay Black American writer and thinks he’s hot shit, and so does everyone else which never helps. Ross Barkan I had mixed feelings on, too; I thought
Glass Century was good and bad and mimetic. Derivative.
Taylor so far is a mix of good, bad, mimetic, MFA-ish and quality. Some deep insight. Emotion on the page. Characters that mostly (but not entirely) feel real. A voice. Multiple POVs. But the characters don’t ever fully feel completely real to me. There are massively slow, boring sections. No plot to speak of, just a Franzen-like character-study, which is similar to Barkan’s book. I also don’t love the myopic, navel-gazing, schizophrenic, closed-in Millennial culture of the book. But that might be consciously or unconsciously or semi-consciously on purpose, because it does largely represent that (my) generation, of which Taylor is a member as well. (I am 42, Taylor is 36: We’re both born in the 1980s.)
Add to that the jerky syntax, the lack of subject-verb coherence and the obsession with short, clipped, Hemingway- or Carver-like fragmentary sentences and it sometimes feels a little like amateur MFA hour. There’s also a lot of autobiography here, given that the author went to the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the novel takes place in Iowa City, with some characters in the MFA program. Yet somehow all but Goran (so far) seem to be from the working-class, which seems unlikely and hard to believe. All the characters are gay. Taylor loves writing in detail about sex, which I found generally uninteresting. There is a LOT of sex and sexual tension and desire and the obsession with “bodies” and men’s corporeal realities. (It also made me wonder how much of this type of writing straight (white) men could get away with before being seen as abusive/perverted/appropriating/misogynist.)
Some of the commentary from certain POVs (Ivan) seem overtly political and ideological, as when Ivan thinks to himself how clueless Goran is, a Black kid adopted by a privileged white family, because Goran doesn’t seem to understand that Black people are really oppressed victims and that the “real” Black people are the poor and working-class folks, and that there really isn’t a Black Middle Class to speak of and, in whatever sense of reality there is a Black Middle Class they’re not really the middle class, and they don’t have sociopolitical power like the white middle class does. This is a boring trope which feels incredibly overplayed at this point. We’ve heard this fake siren song so. Many. Times. Now. The notion that Black people are and always have been oppressed and no matter how much money they have or privileges they acquire, in this terrible American (white power) capitalistic system, damn it, they’re never, ever allowed to genuinely succeed or get ahead.
"It used to seem to him that you could write about the past as a way of understanding the present. But now, his classmates wrote only about the present and its urgency. The very act of comprehension or contextualization was centered on the self, but the self as abstracted via badly understood Marxist ideology. The self in contemporary poetry was really some debased, abject manifestation of a system of wrongs and historical atrocities, shorn of their historical contexts or any real rigorous understanding." ~(Brandon Taylor)
Yet, to Taylor’s credit, he also gives us the POV of Seamus, a working-class white kid who is gay but didn’t seem gay at all (to me) until he casually lets drop an inner comment to himself about the taste of a former professor’s semen. (And after that he goes through what can only be called a scene of grotesque, brutal sexual and then physical abuse by another white local Iowa townie who throat-fucks him and then beats him up and chokes him nearly to death. This townie also, to me, did not seem gay. Sure, I get it; he’s “in the closet.” But it didn’t feel totally believable, as if Taylor mutated reality to fit his artistic purposes even when it didn’t quite feel right or true.)
I don’t think Taylor is mocking Seamus’s whiteness or his working-class background. (Many progressives would do this because, as Zadie Smith so brilliantly put it in a 2016 essay, the Left is thoroughly embarrassed by the white working-class and so has chosen to reject their existence, even when as a group white people, when you adjust for population and crime, are killed more often by cops (ironically of various races) than Black people, etc.)
But Taylor’s novel, so far, and I am a little over halfway through the 300-page novel, always, for me, seems to hover right on the blurry edge of satire and serious sociological commentary. Perhaps it’s a little bit of both.
Taylor strikes me as a very smart writer, and he clearly appreciates language, aesthetics, diction. So it’s hard to say for sure if he’s playing with a Mark Twain-like mockery of white people—and also very possibly Black people, too, in various ways—and if he’s playing around with class assumptions, adding nuance and sparkle to the debate around race and class, or if he’s being more sincere and is trying to “make a point” about there not really being a Black Middle Class and is mocking white people by pointing out their obvious privilege even when they externally don’t seem to have privilege economically. If it’s the former thing, I dig it. If it’s the latter, I’m annoyed. The latter is typical, expected, pandering, too easy and overplayed. The former is clever, ballsy and brave.
It's often for this reason that I don’t super often read contemporary fiction, though I did do reviews of Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, Miranda July’s All Fours, and Good Material, by Dolly Alderton.
The problem I often have with contemporary fiction is that it’s usually terribly myopic; we see the characters’ lives with ludicrous, narcissistic tunnel-vision. It’s often blatantly ideological, and almost always from the same (progressive) direction. It’s sadly often derivative, which I can’t even fault contemporary writers for that much because so much literature came before our time, and reading (especially novels) is swiftly becoming a thing of the past. Add to that the proliferation over the past half century of MFA programs which often produce mimetic, derivative “program fiction,” and you see where this is going.
Reading is down in every category and has been slowly declining for the past 20 years. AI and Chat-GPT are taking over thinking, anyway. People are even now already writing “AI novels,” which of course are not novels at all but digital spewed-out anti-literary pig-slop that tech-bros and tech-women and losers who can’t actually write will use and claim to be geniuses because they just can’t help themselves.
Most of the big $100 words Taylor uses in The Late Americans I’d have cut, as a book editor myself. They sound, to my ear, again, too MFA-y. In those moments Taylor, to me, sounds like he’s trying to sound like a writer versus simply being one. Yet when his sentences work they really work, and some of his lines and paragraphs are stunningly beautiful. Despite anything else, the man can clearly write. The Man has chops. Hard chops. Yet, as I said, some of the laconic, choppy sentences (sentence fragments) sound a little like Sally Rooney’s “TikTok writing.” ADHD-like, fast, two, three, four-word sentences. And that reads to me, sometimes, like writerly impatience, like too much jerkiness, too much stop and start; stop and start. But then again: Is the style not trying to represent The Millennial Mind?
"Fyodor left his mattress and pushed up a window. Outside, the air was dense and cold. Everything glinted. The snow was lumines-cent. The church bell tolled deep and resonant. There was a conifer in the front yard, its branches heavy with snow. The sidewalks were slushy and gray. No one was out in the streets. It wasn't late, but the cold had kept everyone inside. Fyodor stretched until his bones popped, then sat back down on the mattress and took up the book he had been reading. But he found, every now and again, that his vision went hazy or blurry every couple of pages. He couldn't see the letters. He was crying." ~Brandon Taylor
People have called Ross Barken’s Glass Century something like brilliant. Ditto The Late Americans. I can’t say for sure yet. As I said, I’m only a little past halfway. The novel has massive endorsements from people like Oprah and hot writers like Alexander Chee and Emma Cline, as well as from The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, etc. The novel is published by Vintage, in imprint of Penguin-Random House. So he’s a traditionally published author. His other two novels have won and been short-listed for quite a few prestigious awards. He has degrees from two universities, one of which is the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He claims on Substack to want to be the “best Millennial” writer in book publishing. (Like Barkan the dude has one heck of an ego, but so do I and so do most serious, driven writers.)
So far, do I think the novel is “brilliant”? No. I think he’s got a lot of talent. I think he largely knows what he’s doing. And I haven’t read any of his other work. I like walking into something new, fresh and cold. I don’t know anything about Taylor’s personal politics or ideology. I didn’t want to taint my perspective. I wanted to come in totally from the outside.
There are sections of this novel that sing, hum and whir brilliantly like old-school Franzen or even maybe a little like Ta-Nehisi Coates or Michael Chabon. But there are other sections which, full to the brim with overt sexuality, cognitive and verbal dissonance, and dialogue, feels so incredibly myopic, navel-gazing, average, boring, typical and slow that I wanted to skip it all (but didn’t). And with no plot this is a hard sell. The novel could, I think, so far, have used some basic editing in select sections.
Yet he does do one thing extremely well: He understands how to write strong, potent action scenes. He’s good at delivering back-story and personal inner narrative while characters move from location A to location B, doing it without the process feeling purposeful or stilted. He knows, also, how to dissect and unpeel and unpack the profound nuances of emotion and interior emotional reaction between characters in a way that usually feels effective, and sometimes even feels close to masterful.
I know Taylor is renowned and considered one of the hottest writers around right now. I know he’s a Millennial like me. I know he teaches writing. I know he writes on Substack. I know he has three novels out.
He seems important somehow, but, at this point in the novel, I’m still not sure exactly in what way. But the novel initially did pull me right in, hooked me easily and made me want to keep reading. I have since faltered several times. But as of now I am going to keep plowing through. I plan to finish it and if I do I’ll probably do a full, more in-depth review. But if it keeps chuffing into the slow sections, the navel-gazing dialogue and average uninspiring moments of nothingness—just some young people in school and working sitting around being sexually needy, wondering what the fuck it all means—then I might stop reading. We’ll see. I’m trying to give the novel the benefit of the doubt so far.
One final comment. Though the characters feel generally more or less close to real to me (authentic), for some reason I still haven’t fully, truly, completely bought in to the characters. They somehow don’t feel fully fleshed-out to me, even after the back-story and the inner life we’ve been shown.
"He despised the suggestion that he should make his poems say something new, since that posited a progressive view of literature, located the importance of a piece in its being contemporary. The professor's eyes were bright with the effort to connect or reach, and this too was something that Seamus resented." ~Brandon Taylor
Perhaps this is because to some degree they feel a little bit like 2-D wooden caricatures. Not totally, because, like I said, they often feel mostly real. But there’s that 10, 15% which feels fake to me, not quite legitimate, as if we’re seeing the shadows of these characters instead of their real metaphysical bodies. The shadows along the wall in Plato’s Cave, as it were. They feel sometimes a little like cliché Millennial Stand-ins, as if they’re made partially of flesh and partially of carboard but we’re told it’s all flesh. Which is ironic given how much Taylor writes about The Body (which, I must say, especially when it comes to Black men, is also a tired progressive overused trope at this point).
The question does arise for me: Does Taylor get a bit of an easier time from critics and book publishing because he’s a Black Millennial gay man who probably has the “right” politics? Maybe. I can’t answer that. It would be the height of arrogance for me to make a strong, certain claim in either direction. But for me, when discussing the insular world of novels in 2025, it’s impossible not to at least ask the question. He does seem to get away with things, like detailed rough sex scenes, that no straight white author could dream of. *(Click here to read my essay discussing straight white men potentially being held back in publishing novels by white progressive women.)
So I don’t know. I’ll keep going for now. See what happens. See if there’s an uptick in action, see if anything more interesting happens, see if these kids actually start to morph and change and grow, to think more deeply than just fucking and bodies and work and money and their own selfish desires.
Because there is so much more to life than that. Even young life.
Then again: Maybe the whole novel is a statement on exactly this absurdity, immaturity and lack of depth and meaning in life. Classic Millennial ennui and existential dread. Kids debating their class differences, arguing with each other and themselves over who has more privilege while ignoring the simple fact that they ALL have privilege because they’re Americans in 2024. Taylor may be completely aware of all this and in fact may be doing it all on purpose. If so, I love this satirical morality play. But if not: I think this leaves something to be desired.